Notes

1 Dominguez is quoted in Richard Marosi, UC San Diego Professor Who Studies Disobedience Gains Followersand Investigators, Los Angeles Times, May 7, 2010, available at: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/07/local/ la-me-ucsd-professor-20100507-53.

2 Maulana Karenga, Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function, in Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, eds., The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997), 1974. 3 T.V. Reed, The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xiv.

What Is To Be (Un)Done: Notes on Teaching Art and Terrorism

By Mary Patten
n thinking about this piece on art, activism, and pedagogy, I was drawn not so much to that part of my own artmaking and teaching practice consisting of community murals, radical activist printmaking, and street art interventions, but to a series of projects that were catapulted by the long, hard, continuing regime of endless war. This may seem counterintuitive. The former, whose legible precedents and recognizable vernaculars are part of a long tradition of uplift, solidarity, and community, speak to many of the themes of this issue of Radical Teacher. And unless one feels gleefully nihilistic or in the mood for provocation, the pairing of art and terror is bound to elicit feelings of dread. But my aim here is to work through this difficulty, primarily through the lens of Terrorism: A Media History, a class I developed in 2002. Together with my students, I have found that the visual and linguistic rhetorics of terror have the potential to both dull and enhance
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our capacities for political acuity, empathy, and optimismcrucial elements of a politically-conscious creative process that can sustain our ability to imagine and fight for a just, even joyful world. My pedagogy has built upon many years of projects and collaborations that, while not discounting any tool or approach, have attempted a more complicated political response than outrage, unmasking, or critique. I have been drawn to the necessities of embracing the possibility of doubt, in the words of the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, and a process of radically slowing down. Americans have to watch what they say, said Ari Fleischer, former White House Press Secretary, at a White House press briefing on September 26, 2001. Like many other artists, writers, educators, and organizers, I was determined to create a space against the prevailing tide of silencing of dissent so sharply manifest in this White House warning
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of September 2001. All around us, there were quiet sightings of mobilization other than rage and jingoism: a small jeweled peace-sign intertwined with an American flag pin on a nurses uniform, a plastic U.S. flag draped over the entry-way at my neighborhood service station, run by an Iraqi family, where the flag served as protection. Many people, it seemed, felt this moment as one of empathy that briefly promised to extend beyond our presumably-shared identity as Americans. We held our breath. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I teach, a group of students, faculty, and others seized the moment of Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South, a major show at the museum in the fall of 2001, to launch Post-Impressionists for Peace, an ad hoc group that quickly organized on the cusp of the bombing campaign in Afghanistan. Students researched Van Goghs antiwar sentiments in his letters, and printed excerpts on the back of postcards emblazoned with the exhibitions logo. These were passed out to museumgoers, who were also greeted by people wearing Vincent masks holding a banner painted with the words: Van Gogh: War? NO! An exhortation by Slavoj Zizek to resist double blackmail (the argument that mourning those killed in the September 2001 attacks must necessarily translate to patriotic support of the bombing of Afghanistan) appeared at the same time as a student sticker: terrorist? patriot? choose neither! Soon after, I initiated a project with a group of artists, activists, students, and colleagues that several months later manifested itself as Project Enduring Look. The name we gave to this multidisciplinary effort was taken directly from the
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Pentagons aerial surveillance operation in Afghanistan after the bombing campaign. The U.S. militarys caption made a semantic link with Enduring Freedom, the official name used by the U.S. government for the war in Afghanistan. But we wanted to give a different twist to the phrase, emphasizing another kind of temporalitynot permanence or the hardness of steel, but a long, troubled look, an extended pause. This slowing down, we felt, could create a different space to think deeply, to resist the need to rush into action, or even assume a fixed position. Rather than polarizing debate, we wanted to open up the questions: to recognize what already existed in the culture during those short weeks in September and early October. We said, Lets stop, slow down, and carefully, deeply examine the language and the feelings that are being summoned at this moment of crisis. Lets take back the terms of how we understand and make our political culture. For Project Enduring Look, my curatorial practice class and a core group of 10-12 other artists created a hub for a series of events at 1926, the former experimental exhibition space run by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This crazily ambitious project involved over 100 people from Chicago and around the world in a series of exhibitions, exchanges, performances, and screenings that unfolded in an intense three-and-a-half weeks. Instead of the traditional celebratory opening, we locked the gallery, and people gathered in front of the windows to watch silent projections of broken buildings and ruined spaces, sites evocative of destruction and war. At our anti-opening, the automobile, one of the key emblems of the post-war American good life, the embodiment
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of a forever-gone era of industrial labor and capital, and now the sign of a reckless consumer culture dependent on fossil fuels, became a different kind of vehicle. At Project Enduring Look, cars parked in front of the gallery were decorated with colored pennants, reminiscent of a used-car sale, but whose windshields were painted with large letters spelling out words like choices, labor, food, and guilt. The core group of artist-organizers had adopted the popular leftist strategy of generating keywords1 in our brainstorming process. At its heart was the need to take back our language, to exert our power to re-frame the terms of the public discourse of terrorism. Our alternative lexicon spoke to the necessities, scarcities, and possibilities, affective as well as material, both manifest and hidden, during a time of war. The cars interiors became gathering points, complete with tape recorders, for conversations that broadened and extended this brainstorming while people drank coffee and shared snacks, stories, and camaraderie on a cold and dark February night. Later that winter, I developed Terrorism: A Media History, a class that investigates media and cinematic representations of terrorism, historically and in contemporary life, examines the mobilizing effects of these works, and seeks to unpack a hefty suitcase of current debates about moral relativism, just and unjust wars, the problem of evil, and uses of violence in film. In the class, we screen, study, write about, and discuss propaganda films, narratives, film and video essays, photographs, and experimental works whose subject directly or obliquely addresses the subject of political violence. The course is structured as a seminar, with assigned readings drawn from theolNUMBER 89 RADICAL TEACHER

ogy, political science, philosophy, cultural and visual studies, anti-colonial and postcolonial literature, feminist studies, radical histories, media criticism, and current events. We also read interviews with artists and filmmakers, and letters, polemics, and memoirs by members and survivors of revolutionary clandestine movements.2 Students generate an ongoing archive of key words and feelings, which in turn builds our collective class bibliography and knowledge-base. They work on independent research projects, which can take the form of a studio art piece, a video, an image/text analysis, a performance lecture, a research paper, or a puppet show. These are presented to the whole class at the end of the semester. Students attracted to this class include those already engaged in some form of political activismanti-war, anti-racist and anti-occupation organizing, including participants in Post-Impressionists for Peace, global justice and anti-capitalist work, and queer activism. The class draws ideological anarchists, as well as students exhausted by what they call activist-ism and people who are looking to make sense of a dizzyingly incoherent political landscape. Artists whose practice tends to the moving imageincluding film, video, new media, and animationare drawn to the class, as well as those working in sculpture, performance, art history, theory, criticism, and visual/critical studies. Visual communication and other design students interested in the concepts and uses of propaganda are often on the roster. And given the rich undercurrents in relational and other extra- or alter-art world practices that broadly proliferate in Chicago (through energy concentrations and spaces like Mess Hall, Insight Arts, Experimental Station, and Version, and
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in publications such as AREA Chicago and Proximity) there are often students who are part of these glocal networks. The class has far exceeded the expectations of a topical seminar, and has become one of our departments key offerings. It evidently speaks to a generation of young artists, media makers, writers, and emerging scholars intent on examining the multiple valences of political violence and their representations and mobilizations in film, media, and visual art.

We begin with the importance of names. Units are called things like: shoot the women first, terror or love, a terror of images, and puppets are terrorists, too. The lexicon of the class includes names that may be lost to us now but that were once pivotal, on hundreds of thousands of lips: guerrilla, foco theory, womens liberation, the wretched of the earth. At our first meeting, we begin what will become a semester-long excavation of the visual and linguistic rhetorics of terrorism, while resisting a final definition of what terrorism is. Sometimes we will use a prompt a video clip, a reading, or perhaps an entire film to generate our keywords, or sometimes we just plunge in. More recently, Ive used a terrorism take home quiz with multivalent political feelings to get things started.3 [See pages 44 and
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Keywords, Critical Feelings, Feeling Politics

45, top] Crucial to this process has been the inclusion not only of analytically discursive frames, but of political affect: we are, after all, talking about a war on an emotion.4 This goes against the political common-sense that dictates that we must rise above our presumably unintelligent and raw feelings if we are ever to behave like enlightened citizens. A stunning lesson in this regard was brought home to me in one of the first semesters of this class. During our first keywords brainstorming session, a student defined terrorism as anything that induced fear, whether or not any overt acts are committed. Her statement cut to the heart of our current malaise, where, as we are constantly reminded at U.S. airports, the terror alert is always orange. Her words sidestepped debates about what constitutes terrorism and what analytical criteria we bring to bear on the question, revealing how much terror is not the target, but the substance, the life-blood, of the wars of our political moment. Part of my job in the class is to remind us how emotions are manipulated and orchestrated to suit the needs and agendas of forces that are not necessarily visible to us. But at the same time, how do we understand the urgent necessity to pay attention to, live with, and work through the affective political currents swirling around us? We need to de-fang terrorism, to be sure, to coolly understand it as a tactic of warfare that has been used for thousands of
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SLIDES FROM THE TERRRORISM TAKE HOME qUIz

years. But while it is crucial to look at the historical groundings of a term like terrorism, its uses in military and political discourses, and how a range of actors state and non-state alikeshape policy and change events, it is clear that the most brilliant, distanced, and objective analysis is not enough to counter the very medium through which so much of this new kind of warfare is prosecuted. We must recognize and speak to the way terror works on us. I frequently show Battle of Algiers very early on in the class, during the first one or two sessions, as a springboard for discussion and brainstorming. This signal piece of politically-engaged cinema is rich with content, and can be viewed through multiple thematic frames: anti-colonization and national liberation struggles, torture and terrorism, just war theory and moral equivalence, the role of women in revolutionary struggle, and unfinished/failed revolutions. Battle of Algiers is a great re-enactment, and begins by announcing itself as a work of fiction. This is not a legal disclaimer. Instead it calls attention to the way the film was made: to the closeness of the space between documentary and re-imagined and remembered cinema verit. This space is so close that the Pentagon studied the film at the onset of the Iraq war for insights into guerrilla warfare in an occupied Arab country. Because the film is so powerful cinematically, it evokes complex scenarios and risky ambiguities, which are important to untangle. One of these are the multiple and various uses of the gaze: Ali Lapointes demand that the policeman he is assigned to shoot look at him;
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Battle of Algiers: A Case Study

the Algerian woman who slowly looks at the customers in a bar about to be torn to bits by the homemade bomb she is carrying; the looks on the faces of witnesses to torture, both French soldier and Algerian civilian. These varied uses of the gaze, especially through anti-colonial and psychoanalytic lenses, make the film a rich object for cinema studies. The powerful uses of these long looks embody the desperate need of the colonized for recognition by the colonizer; the horror of the disciplining gaze; and the long, silent looks full of terrible knowledge of what is to come, the consequences of ones necessary acts. The same sorrowful musical chords are heard after different scenes of destruction, no matter who planted the bomb. This sense of a long look embodies the complexity and ambiguity of a story that eschews simple oppositions between perpetrator and victim, good and evil. More recently we used the method of free writing, a tool many writers and artists use in their own work. Because it involves an associative, non-linear process, attached to no object but itself, this dreaming out loud can often yield a deeper kind of excavation than a strictly analytical, discursive approach. This is a great equalizerno one is held in higher esteem because of her theoretical fluency or rhetorical confidence. Everyone listens and pays attention to everyone else. What does Madeline notice, differently from Jorge or Maissa? While watching a film like Battle of Algiers, we will jot down names, phrases, memory triggers. We will then read these aloud, listening to each other without commentary. Our list-making and brainstorming includes feelings/emotions, images, and sounds as well as linguistic signifiersnot just what is being represented and how, but what it
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feels like in our bodies while we watch, and what lingers afterwards. Everything is allowed to stew together with belief and conviction, yielding a fuller, more dissonant awareness. We then categorize our words and lists in terms of political concepts/ideas, feelings/emotions, and sensory triggers. Then, through the students couplings of terror or terrorist with one of their keywordsespecially a word that denotes an image, sound, or feelingthey begin their web-based image research. They look for the surprising and unexpected while also taking inventory of the predictable (Hamas rallies, masks, images of casualties). We share these, and ask: what languages do these images speak, in what key or registerhorror, humor, cynical reason? What do they mobilize? Do we accept them as natural or something other than authentic, false, or manipulated? What potentials do these images raise for us? Throughout the semester, we exchange our real time responses and articulations while negotiating the many films, art works, videos, YouTube forays, media interventions, propaganda, and punditry that make up the visual curriculum of the class. Our listmaking, brainstorming, free-writing, and collecting of visual and textual rhetorics is an ongoing process, the spine and nerve-endings of the class, a way for us to keep checking in with one other. There are also striking ways in which theoretical pieces can puncture complacency or received wisdom about the political/social valences of terror. One particularly useful tool has been The Rhetoric of the Image by Roland Barthes.5 This mid-1960s piece is extremely useful not just as a pictorial introduction to semiotics, but because of Barthes haunting
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words about the terror of certain signs. He was not speaking politically, in any kind of direct way, but was writing about the anxiety produced by the instability, discontinuity, and uncertainty aroused by unfixed meanings. This has pushed us as a class to confront our discomfort about not knowing, and to realize that settled, given meanings, while familiar and reassuring, often function to level complexity, or worse, mask terrible things. Barthes also helps us understand that a photograph can seem to naturalize a framed reality, because of its proximity (likeness) to that which it represents, thus hiding the artifice, the frame, and the intention of whomever is behind the camera. Discontinuities and breaksfor both makers and readersallow a nonhierarchical ordering of the senses that can create a more active and participatory audience, with potentially liberatory political effects. How do we unpack and de-code, but also what do pictures say, spill, and leak, in spite of themselves? After we have established a collective process of knowledge-making that emphasizes the emotive and the sensory as well as the analytical, we are ready to investigate historic precedents and contemporary strategies of political art, to study how different representations and strategies work, and what they do. The curriculum of Terrorism: A Media History draws on many kinds of film languages, genres, and modes of address: agit-prop, neo-realist, social realist, direct cinema, cinema verit, expressionism, essay film, re-enactment, performance, found footage, narrative fiction, magic realism, speculative and science fiction, amateur and DIY videos on YouTube, silent cinema, new wave, old wave, broadcast news journalism, and media specRADICAL TEACHER NUMBER 89

tacle. We pay special attention to how these varying film forms use or disavow irony, catharsis, and empathy. We look at the modernist avant-garde strategy to shock, to make things strange through radical juxtaposition, or suspending narrative pleasure in favor of a direct confrontation with audience, spectator, reader. We become aware of the intentions of the filmmakers, their manipulations, framings, and points-of-view, and discuss how each of us is affected and moved. We look at unmasking and de-mystification as a Marxist strategy. We look at urgent claims to force disclosure of information and truth that motivates so much critical grassroots media, like Democracy Now. We debate whether or not these strategies entail an over-reliance on rational, analytic models for understanding, and if transparency is perhaps over-ratedan execution is still an execution, after all, whether public or hidden from view. We look at the hot agit-prop of JUNG: War in the Land of the Mujahadeen, an unapologetically subjective documentary that uses identificatory strategies to produce a connection between viewers and gravely wounded people in Afghanistan. Films like these rely on the horror of the image, and the belief that pictures can change consciousness. We look at the cool agitprop of the Yes Men, Billionaires for Bush, Jon Stewart, and Bryan Boyce, who all use impersonation, tricks, satire, and caustic wit to brilliant ends. We look critically at the uses of irony: always at the ready to outsmart, outlast, and out-whip the worst-case specters and scenarios. We are helped here by the late and great Eve Sedgwick, who wrote so beautifully about the pull of the paranoid view: we already know what to expect, so we will not be ambushed or surprised, an event even
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worse than the horrible scenarios that are already, always, unfolding. We look at a different kind of coolness in Harun Farockis Inextinguishable Fire, that tells viewers in its opening moments: If we show you pictures of Napalm damage, you will close your eyes... first, you will close your eyes to the pictures, then, you will close your eyes to the memory... then, you will close your eyes to the facts... then you will close your eyes to the connections between them If the viewer wants no responsibility for Napalms effects, what responsibilities will they take for the explanations of its use?6

We look at how torture is represented in Carl Dreyers classic of silent cinema, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and in a contemporary documentary like The Torture Question. After watching the most brutal and harrowing beatings, we see long shots of haunting stillnessthe time it takes for one guard to wash blood from a prison corridor floorin Steve McQueens Hunger. We debate the refusal of narration in James Longleys Gaza Strip, in contrast to John Pilgers sonorous and moralistic voice-over in Palestine Is Still the Issue. We argue about our enjoyment or disdain for spectacular hijacking scenes, scored to Do the Hustle, in Johan Grimonprezs dial h-i-s-t-o-r-y, or the Dionysian explosion at the end of Antonionis Zabriskie Point, or the bombing of the radio tower atop of the World Trade Center in Lizzie Bordens speculative feminist fantasy Born in Flames.

This Chris Marker quote from Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de Lair Est Rouge) eloquently captures the misfires, mis-

Sometimes you dont know what youre filming

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recognitions, and delays that sometimes occur when we are looking at something strange or incomprehensible. In the class, we discussed our initial responses to the first published Abu Ghraib photos of a pile of live bodies in a prison corridor: what is happening here? For some, this did not conform to our fantasy of a scene of torture. As more and more pictures were released, what became chillingly clear was that the threat of a snarling dog or being wrapped in electrodes produced damage as serious, and perhaps more enduring, than the physical application of the tools of torture themselves. At the heart of the most cruel and abject suffering in these scenes is utter humiliation, one of the ultimate weapons of psychological warfare, whose goal is to dismember the personality. Another set of misrecognitions and disarticulations emerged when we watched a homemade video from a Norwegian web site of children playing a game of hostages. This amateur re-staging of a staged media event elicited more horror and dismay than the actual beheading videos of the same period. Some in the class argued that the children were monsters, while others speculated that they were innocents being directed and manipulated by unseen, off-screen adults. We marveled at how this scene of very white, Nordic children enacting a videotaped execution with masks and sticks made us all unwilling accomplices in a fictional beheading scenario, where the lens of the camera becomes our gaze, against our will. This gets to what I call the problem of difficult pictures, another central preoccupation of the class. Pictures are a staple in warfare. The shock and awe campaign during the first weeks of the Iraq war was intended to produce an image of reality so
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overpoweringly awful that Iraqis would quickly surrender. Some have argued that this spectacle was, perhaps unconsciously, intended to displace the image of the burning towers in New York. The recent and persistent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the war on terrorism have been punctuated by debates about the roles and responsibilities of media. Many voices on the left have accused broadcast media of sanitizing these wars, and specifically the role of the United States, by refusing to show images of bloodshed, torn bodies, civilian casualties, and the remains of soldiers killed in combat. The underlying premise here is that if only people could see these images, then they would turn against the violence. But horror and revulsion, in and of themselves, produce nothing but more of the samea kind of numbness. Ones politics will shape how, and what, one sees and feels. This is the problem of anguished pictures: what Susan Sontag has characterized in Regarding the Pain of Others as . . . the gruesome . . . (inviting) us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look.7 There are other dangers, too: aestheticizing war and trauma, or quoting alreadysaturated images, which have been emptied of power by their endless repetition. Some critics use terms like unflinching and unblinking to authorize the long, penetrating gaze, making it somehow intrinsically courageous and risky. But what does it mean to want to produce shock, to manipulate images and sounds that evince a long, drawn-out visceral response, to make an audience gasp with horror and revulsion? What does this mean for the maker, what does this produce for an audience, is agency possible, or is political action endlessly deferred by feelings of pity, shame, even empaRADICAL TEACHER NUMBER 89

thy? Is it possible the underlying premise al costs) of those to make a prison here is that if only people conflicts, as did a narrative that is could sEE these images, graduate student not exploitative, to then they would turn from Puerto Rico use violent images against the violence. whose relatives have been killed without reducing them to spectacle? What happens to or imprisoned for their pro-independence institutionalized and structural violence activities. Because Terrorism: A Media History that is difficult or impossible to picture, so normalized that it is rendered practi- is a course cross-listed with Art History, Theory and Criticism, Visual and Critical cally invisible? Many international students have taken Studies, and Film, Video, and New the class, as well as bicultural/bi-national Media, students can choose among a students trying to sort out their identi- research paper, pictorial essay, or other ties and positions in relationship to their piece of imaginative writing; a visual parents generation, sometimes resisting study or performance lecture; or a video and sometimes welcoming absorption and or other studio art project as their final assimilation into America and the global presentation. Studio projects have includart market. At different points the class ed zines, comics, flipbooks, mini-graphic has been a flashpoint for radically dif- novellas, pop-up books, small sculptures, ferent political views; the occupation of puppet shows, posters, endurance perforthe West Bank and Gaza and the over- mance installations, and large relational all Israel/Palestine conflict is an obvious sculptures. Students have written papers example. But differences have been less on rape as a weapon of war and the keffialong predictable ideological/religious yeh as a fashion statement. Emily Siefken, lines than between a cynical view that an army veteran, made a Tomb of the sees war in the Middle East as eternal Known to memorialize fallen female soland unchangeable and an outraged impa- diers in the current conflicts in Iraq and tience with apathy. At crucial points, Afghanistan. Jesse Trippe re-designed progressive students from both Israel and The Bill of Rights, while Pam Paggao took Palestine have provided a much more five yards of woven fabric, and systematicomplicated, on-the-ground perspective cally pierced it with 1,000 straight pins. about small, under-the-radar resistance Mabel Nuernbergs postcard, in which to the occupation and the separation she wears only a keffiyeh and a gun, referwall by young Palestinian activists and ences both Lynda Bengliss naked dildo Israeli anarchists, as well as the prolonged shoot from a 1974 issue of Art Forum and state of dread, anxiety, and the monotony Elia Suleimans sexy high-heeled ninja of suffering that characterizes life there in Divine Intervention, who dismantles beyond the fireworks of the news. A stu- checkpoints in the occupied territories dent from Nigeria whose extended family merely by walking past them. Mabels includes people who have been impris- self-portrait is conscious of the commodioned for their involvement in the struggle fication of radical chic from Patty Hearst against big oil educated all of us about to Leila Khaled, while evincing a kind of the political economy (and the emotion- cynical joy. What is maybe not so visible
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here is Mabels struggle with hybridityboth the desire and resistance to assimilate, to pass as white, and to reconcile these conflicting forces with her ties to her Algerian Arab father. Lara Manzanares used imagery related to terrorism to construct image-based childrens toys to juxtapose the complexity of the topic to the simplicity and straightforwardness of a childs point of view. These included a kaleidocycle, a Jacobs ladder, and a spinning top, all of which involve potentially never-ending or continuous movement, subject to the control of the user. In Brenna Conley-Fondas delicate line drawing from one of the photographs of an Abu Ghraib prisoner, she uses the medium of her own hair. Here the gap between there and here is collapsed via the bodya physical remnant of hers re-figuring a representation of his. The long dark hairs from Brennas head are molded into fine lines with glue to create the arching back and bound arms of the tortured Iraqi, whose face and head in the photograph are obscured by the humiliating underwear. In Brennas hands, the abjection of the photo is transformed into a gesture of connection, of sorrow, of careful and healing touch. Some projects were in gestation during the class, appearing later as fully-realized works. In Edward Salems experimental video works Ghazawi and Impunity, the camera disturbs and sensitizes: a horses bleeding sores and lacerated eye speak eloquently, strangely, and beautifully of the enormous suffering of people, animals, and land. In spring 2010, Distant Voices Right Now was a collaborative writing and
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sound project instigated after watching Chris Markers Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de Lair Est Rouge), an epic film essay on the global revolutionary upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The project coordinators, Rae Ann Langes and Jillian Soto, with participation and performances by Megan Bonke, Snrre Henriksen, George Sferra, Madeline Snively, and Abbie Wilson, organized our collective free-writings into a kind of exquisite corpse, grouping phrases under I/You statements, actions, questions, events, exclamations, endings, and refrains. After several rehearsals, we crafted an improvisatory spoken-word piece, collaged with a found sound mix from the film and live guitar and keyboard passages. Phrases included: We have to ask, is anyone against it? I feel guilty . . . I feel ashamed . . . I come from a middle class family . . . Look at it burn . . . Stop staring! It should be possible, if everyone is willing . . . One must go on! and Why do . . . sometimes . . . images . . . begin . . . to tremble? These projects represent a range of tonalities, affects, and politics. All are sharp, eloquent, intelligent, and deeply felt. All risk a kind of ambivalence and undecidability in their aesthetics and politics, which in no way precludes commitment, the ability to make a clear statement, or the necessity to take a principled stand. But most opt for a radical openness, and a caution against invoking absolute truths, even those that proceed from direct experience. At the end of the semester, we can see that it is perhaps unhelpful to even
RADICAL TEACHER NUMBER 89

DRAWING BY BRENNA CONLEY-FONDA

use the term terror at all, and that, to paraphrase Edward Said, we should be discussing and debating the uses of political violence by multiple actors (including states) instead.8 The class, in each new iteration, has created a temporary community, a way of being together where dissent, difference, and respect co-exist, although sometimes painfully. At its most successful, we all risk a kind of vulnerability in relation to knowledge, each other, and our work, and a thoughtful slowing-down that goes against the kind of hyper-rational certainty and mastery that has been so disastrous and duplicitous in the hands of power. In some ways our cultural rationality is a lifeboat, the medium through which we become habituated to the endless state of emergency as described by Walter Benjamin, where the task is to manage unimaginable crises, from an oceanic oil gush to endless war. The way we look, sense, and feel are all components of our thinking, all crucial to resisting the mechanisms of the societies of control.9 The question remains for all artists, thinkers, writers, and teachers who try to do the work we do mindfully, and politically: does slowingdown mitigate against urgency, against agency, when so much needs to be both done and undone? The question can only be answered in a spirit of optimism, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. We must continually reinvent the tools we use to unpack, unlearn, learn and rebuild, to create the kind of change we want to makein the present tense, mindful of the past, and for the future too.

tural critic Raymond Williams (Fontana Communications Series, London: Collins, 1976); but also updates and extensions, like Jan Zita Grovers AIDS: Keywords, October 102 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 17-30. 2 The bibliography of the class includes Augustine and Aquinas on just war theory; Walter Laqueur on the political history of terrorism; excerpts from Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer; Deleuzes Postscript for the Societies of Control; writings on violence by cultural theorists Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Slavoj Zizek, and Jasbar Puar; studies on guerrilla warfare by Che Guevara, Regis Debray, and Frantz Fanon; feminist critiques by Robin Morgan, Gayatri Spivak, and Zilla Eisenstein; writings by radical historians Howard Zinn, Barbara Engel and Cliff Rosenthal, Eric Hobsbauwm, and George Katsiaficas; Obamas Nobel Prize speech; excerpts from memoirs by Emma Goldman, Cathy Wilkerson, Assata Shakur, Bill Ayers, Ulrike Meinhof, Astrid Proll, and Bommi Baumann; and The Scum Manifesto. The filmography/videography includes Sergei Eisensteins October, Eric Rohmers The Lady and the Duke, Peter Watkins La Commune, the sequences on anarchism and the labor movement in Chicago: City of the Century, Isaac Juliens Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks, Adam Curtis The Power of Nightmares, Paul Chans Baghdad in No Particular Order, Margarethe VonTrottas Marianne and Juliane, Emile de Antonios Underground, and Fassbender, Kluge et al.s Germany in Autumn. 3 The take-home quiz was made in response to an on-line contest set up by supporters of Andrej Holm and other anti-gentrification activists and researchers in Berlin who have been targeted by Germanys anti-terrorism laws. Writers, activists, artists, and concerned people in Germany and internationally made projects to answer the question What is
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Notes
1 The bedrock influence is the eponymous Keywords by Marxist writer and culNUMBER 89 RADICAL TEACHER

terrorism?: http:// einstellung.so36.net/ en/was-ist-terror/917. 4 Lauren Berlant, The Epistemology of State Emotion, in Dissent in Dangerous Times, ed. Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 46-78. 5 Roland Barthes, The Rhetoric of the Image, from Image, Music, Text, edited and translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 32-51.

6 Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969, distributed by the Video Data Bank http://www.vdb.org. 7 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). 8 Power Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan (NYC: Vintage Books, 2001). 9 Gilles Deleuze, Postscript for the Societies of Control, October, Vol. 59 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 3-7.

The Sustainable Energy of the Bread & Puppet Theater: Lessons Outside the Box
By Marc Estrin
read somewhere that the average lifespan of an independent theater group is about seven years. I do not know where such figures originate, but from my experience it seems plausible to me. The average lifespan of a poorly maintained urban tree is seven years. If seven years is an average lifespan, equivalent to a human life of 75, and if Bread & Puppet (B & P) has been around since 1963, that would make the Bread & Puppet Theater approximately 470 human years old. So, as you might ask about any 470-year-old person, what is it that sustains the Bread & Puppet Theater? Why has it lived so long and so energetically?
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And more generally, what is it that makes any organizationpolitical, social and artistic, educationallong-term sustainable? Perhaps Bread & Puppet can do some radical teaching here. Unlike most things in the depleting world, this group seems to run on a battery that is ever recharging and ever recharged. And like a battery, its strength is directly proportional to the difference, the tension, between opposite poles. My thought, after working with them for forty years, is that the secret of Bread & Puppets survival is its continual feeding on six opposites in the universe. A Marxist or a Hegelian might call it eating dialectical tension.
RADICAL TEACHER NUMBER 89

PHOTO BY DONNA BISTER, SEE MORE BREAD AND PUPPET IMAGES ON P. 44

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